Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Sungoo Im has held three solo exhibitions, 《A Castle Built of Dust》 (Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024), 《A Flower Which Can’t Even Be Seen: Excavating Footprints》 (SeMA Storage, Seoul, 2022), and 《Black Sand On Paper》 (Gallery Chosun, Seoul, 2019).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Im has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《The Act of Collaboration》 (Incheon Art Platform, Incheon, 2024-2025), 《Dear My Forest》 (MMCA Children’s Museum, Gwacheon, 2024), 《Stand Alone》 (Gallery SP, Seoul, 2024), 《Maps with PACK》 (Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022), 《DOOSAN Art Lab 2022》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2022), 《ICON》 (Hakgojae Gallery, Seoul, 2021), and more.

Awards (Selected)

Im presented a solo presentation with the DrawingRoom at the ‘Focus Asia’ section of Frieze Seoul 2025.

Residencies (Selected)

Im was an artist-in-residence at the 14th Incheon Art Platform program.

Originality & Identity

Sungoo Im’s practice begins with exploring the multifaceted nature of the world through traces of personal memory and everyday life. In early drawings such as Unusual and Peaceful Days(2017) and We Gathered in the Valley of the Black Mountain(2019), the artist captured vanishing spaces, people, and remnants of time, transforming personal recollections into visual narratives. Her gaze revives emotions and sceneries that emerge from the peripheries of reality, leading to an inquiry into things that are invisible yet undoubtedly present.

Her first solo exhibition, 《Black Sand On Paper》(Gallery Chosun, 2019), was a concrete manifestation of this interest, visualizing the moment when memory disperses and likening it to “black sand,” thereby revealing the unstable condition of existence. Later, in 《Unusual and Peaceful Days》(Hakgojae Design Project Space, 2020), she visualized layers of the unconscious through worlds where mountains, humans, and animals intertwine, and in 《A Flower Which Can’t Even Be Seen: Excavating Footprints》(SeMA Storage, 2022), she expanded this inner exploration into a spatial experience, drawing inspiration from Yi Sang’s poem Cliff and the pursuit of an “unseen flower.”

Her thematic inquiry consistently converges on one question: “How can the fragments of memory be gathered again?” Im collects and sutures scattered pieces, revealing through this process the intersections between personal narratives and collective memory. In her recent solo exhibition 《A Castle Built of Dust》(Kumho Museum of Art, 2024), these fragments are built into “walls” or “fortresses,” evolving into a narrative structure where collapse and construction, forgetting and preservation coexist.

Style & Contents

Im’s work begins with the handling of everyday yet unstable materials such as graphite, paper, and sand. Her early drawings experiment with the smudging and crumbling qualities of graphite, visualizing the sensory temperature that shifts with the pressure of the hand. In 《Black Sand On Paper》, she intensified this material inquiry by repeatedly scratching, rubbing, and erasing graphite on paper, presenting drawing as a material event in itself.

From there, her formal experiments expanded beyond the two-dimensional plane. In 《Unusual and Peaceful Days》, she transformed her drawings into moving images, reconstructing the Hidden Mountain series as animation—a new painterly form that simultaneously addresses time and narrative. Subsequently, in 《A Flower Which Can’t Even Be Seen: Excavating Footprints》, she spatially rearranged paper drawings, shifting toward an installation-based approach that placed the viewer’s movement and perception at the center.

Her 2023 work Eyes in the Closet exists between two and three dimensions: the artist hardened layered paper like stone and embedded graphite drawings within it, materializing the notion of “the gazing subject” within space. This semi-sculptural form extends from the paper-collage experiments first introduced in 《Touch Stone》(Shinhan Gallery, 2022), where she generated new stories by tearing and reassembling preexisting worlds. Finally, in 《A Castle Built of Dust》, paper itself functions as an architectural structure—a material that simultaneously constructs both “walls” and “narratives.”

Topography & Continuity

Sungoo Im is recognized as one of the most delicate young artists exploring the “materialization of memory” within the field of contemporary Korean drawing. Her practice combines the material properties of graphite with the physical manipulation of paper, presenting the transformation of personal memory into a formative structure. As seen in works such as Deep Hill, Second Side Road(2022) and Eyes in the Closet(2023), she blurs the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and installation, expanding the possibilities of narrative drawing.

Her experimentation demonstrates how drawing in contemporary Korean art has evolved beyond a mere act of recording into a “spatial language of form.” Im’s work constructs a complex sensibility in which memory and material, interior and space, reflect and shape each other—visually probing the boundary between personal narratives and collective time.

She continues to expand the material and spatial narratives of her practice through exhibitions such as 《Stand Alone》(Gallery SP, 2024), 《Dear My Forest》(MMCA Children’s Museum, 2024), and 《The Act of Collaboration》(Incheon Art Platform, 2024–2025). Her solo presentation in the ‘Focus Asia’ section at Frieze Seoul 2025 marks a turning point, extending her “world of paper” to the international stage.

Going forward, Sungoo Im is expected to further develop her visual language rooted in paper and graphite, merging memory, place, and narrative structure across diverse exhibition contexts. Though her world remains composed of “fragile and delicate stories,” her act of connecting traces of time, memory, and existence continues to expand into ever-widening terrains.